Love God with all your Mind

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. -Mark 12:30 (NIV)

Intelligent Faith's mission is to defend and proclaim biblical truth around the world. We accomplish this through teaching, speaking, and writing to train followers of Jesus how to love God with all our mind and persuade non-believers that Christianity is true. We are committed to preparing believers “to give an answer for the reason for the hope that we have.” (1 Peter 3:15)

Meet Laurie Stewart

Meet John Stewart

John Stewart is a lawyer, Christian apologist, author, and award-winning radio personality. His newest book, More Than A Prophet: The Identity of Jesus from the Bible, Qur'an and Early Sources, is available now.

Although I’ve taught for years about the deity of Jesus, this was a special opportunity to speak to Muslims who have only heard what their polemicists have told them, namely that Jesus is not God, and that the Bible has been corrupted.

It is clear to me that the transgender battle lines are being drawn in the United States, with President Obama and the progressives on one side, churches on the other, and even many normally-indifferent Americans speaking out against allowing men into girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms because they “feel” like women.

False rumors and urban legends are not new phenomena, but with the advent of the Internet, there is now no end to weird, strange, and often demonstrably false claims. Such is the case when a friend gave me a copy of a note provided by a skeptic.

Last year I had the privilege of helping organize the first Intelligent Faith Conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (about three hours from where I live). The event was such a success that now it is an annual event.

I recently returned from my teaching trip to Kenya and Uganda. As I am recovering from jet lag, I wanted to share with you a recent email from our dear friend in Uganda who set up a radio interview for me and all my teaching opportunities in Uganda.

Arthur Magezi and I were driven in a beat-up car to the bush outside Kamuli, to an area called Makanga. It took one hour on marginal dirt roads to reach the Makanga, and we passed several small villages along the way. When we arrived at the church, I was not totally surprised at what I saw.

Here in Iowa, the harvest begins in about a month. October is typically the month when the corn and beans take precedence over most everything else. As the weather gets cold, it is a spectacle to see the farmers working late into the night to get their crops out of the field.

On short notice I was asked by my old friend, Bishop Samuel Munai, to be a keynote speaker at a three-day conference at Lake Nakuru, Kenya for a thousand pastors. Laurie gave me the “okay,” and on August 21 I left for Kenya, East Africa, for my ninth mission trip to Kenya.

One of the criticisms leveled against Christianity is that our primary sources for the life and teachings of Jesus—the four gospels—are anonymous. In addition, critics often add that the gospels were likely written a long time after the events, at locations far removed from Palestine, by unknown writers who were not witnesses to the events.

Our Indonesia trip was as eventful and successful as any we’d been on before. Laurie and I can only stand in amazement at how blessed we were to see with our eyes the opportunities to build up the church in Indonesia.

Christians like to point to the martyrdom of the first apostles as evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. They base their hypothesis on the premise that people don’t die for a lie they know to be false. People might die for a lie that they believe to be true, but not one they know to be false.

Until just a few years ago when my husband mentioned it, I didn’t even know there was a question about the ending of Mark 16. When comparing the shorter ending with the longer ending, it is clear that the longer version is a happier ending. Did Bible editors include the longer version just to give us a happy ending?

As you may or may not know, before I became a dedicated follower of Jesus, I identified as a liberal feminist. I believed in the right of women to be strong, independent, equal, and even the right to make hard "choices." My identity changed as I discovered who I really was as a special child of God.

When I set out to write this series, one of my main motivations was to gain clarity in my own mind about the truth of the matter. I had procrastinated on analyzing the biblical data and stating my official position concerning the role of women in the church. I owed it to both to myself and to the Christian community to do so.

Women were most certainly viewed by Jewish men as second-class citizens, a sort of property. Female testimony in a court of law didn’t even hold as much weight as the testimony of a man. Women were seen as less intelligent and less trustworthy.

The argument I’m attempting to develop in this series is that taking Paul’s statements about restrictions on women in isolation from other Scripture and then applying them to all people, in all churches, in all times, and in all places is a misunderstanding of Paul’s intention.

We certainly shouldn’t minimize the fact that The Twelve—the dozen men Jesus hand-picked to be his principal learners and leaders—were all men; that is significant. But, we also cannot ignore the fact that there were others, including women, who learned and ministered under the direction of Jesus.